


Catechism, One Way

by Margo_Kim



Category: The Exorcist (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Doubt, Episode Tag, Gen, Having Faith, POV Marcus, Protective Marcus, Religion, Roman Catholicism, mostly fic about religious pondering in relation to marcus's past present and future
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-30
Updated: 2017-11-30
Packaged: 2019-02-08 20:48:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12872694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: It's going to hurt for a long time and it never stops hurting. He thinks about saying that to Harper. He says the first part instead, leaves it there, paints pain in cheery colors because that's as honest as the gloomy ones. As some saint must have cried, it is what it is. She won't live the life he did, so that's already looking better for her.Marcus in the hospital, post 2x03.





	Catechism, One Way

It takes Marcus years, and he’s got still more years to go, to learn about spectrums. The bits between yes/no, on/off. His father killed his mother. His father was a monster. His mother was killed by his father. His mother was a martyr. His father was bad and Marcus was right to kill him, his mother was good and it was wrong that she died. This he held true as best he could, in the face of memories: his father on a good day, taking Marcus out to the woods, putting the hunting rifle in his arms, showing him how to shoot straight at what you wanted dead, clapping his shoulder, saying well done; his mother and her voice soft and frail as onion paper opining how much happier she would have been if Marcus had died in her womb or maybe infancy, after he got baptized but before he grew up and opened his wicked little mouth.

Sometimes people do bad things and good things over the course of their lives, and sometimes people who do bad things get punished worse than they deserve, and sometimes people who do mostly good things get punished for the bad things they still did, and sometimes people have more ugliness in them than beauty but you still cry when they die, and sometimes you love the people you kill. Marcus has that in common with his father.

It's going to hurt for a long time and it never stops hurting. He thinks about saying that to Harper. He says the first part instead, leaves it there, paints pain in cheery colors because that's as honest as the gloomy ones. As some saint must have cried, it is what it is. She won't live the life he did, so that's already looking better for her.

Marcus gave his life to God and the church excommunicated him. Fine. They bought him for five quid and got their money's worth. He doesn't need the collar, doesn't need the orders (he and Luther might have got on alright, Marcus could have added a couple more theses on not being pompous twats that they'd have nailed to the door). He gave—he _gives_ —his life for God, and God gives him work. Gives him purpose, gives him strength, gives him the warmth that is the divine right of all human beings if they would but turn their face to it. He is a cracked and jagged cup and the Lord fills him to the brim.

And it's good. It's as good as it can be. He does good, and sometimes he even lets himself think about heaven, if he makes it in, when he'll be something he can't recognize, a spirit of perfect satisfaction. Evil is privation of good. What was missing in Marcus that Father Sean saw all those years ago, that Father Sean thought might be filled with God? What was missing in his father every night of his miserable life, drunk, drunk, drunk, drinking to stay drunk and drinking still more when getting drunk wasn’t enough to make his life something worth living, his family something worth loving? What was missing in his mother who faded like linen washed over generations into the dust and shadows of her own home, until the only memories that Marcus has of her are what demons say when they wear her skin? And her corpse. Marcus remembers that too. Remembers the flesh when the spirit had fled, perhaps, to heaven. The emptied flesh of his mother was the same as that of Mary, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, born without sin, perfected by grace, the morning star rising, the queen of heaven, who accepted God into her womb and wept as her son writhed on the cross. Two human women. Did one ever deign to look to the other?

You don’t deserve this, Marcus wants to tell Harper, wants to tell her again, wants to hold her head and shout it like exorcism until she believes it. Let Marcus be the vessel of God for the words this child needs. She doesn’t deserve to suffer like this, she doesn’t deserve a mother like that, she doesn’t deserve a savior like him, she doesn’t deserve everything that will come next.

When Marcus was twelve he saw the face of God. Harper is eleven. What will she see, between then and now?

Mother Bernadette's pocket watch keeps time with him. He checks it while the doctor checks Tomas (Tomas, another trial, another gift, either from God for Marcus or else Marcus is a test for him). It's four on the dot, and Mother Bernadette enjoys a walk in the garden. She let Marcus use the convent's showers, and he feels halfway human again. Casey is not better; the demon is not gone. Mother Bernadette checks a rose bush and says, "We don't get what we deserve. God is too generous for that. What great good could you have ever done to equal the gift of sunshine on a winter's day? Or music? Or a child's laughter? Everything you have is due to God. There is no repaying Him. We must make ourselves worthy of what He gives, knowing we will always fall short.”

"And people say nuns are gloomy," Marcus replies, and Mother Bernadette gives him a look that Mary must have given once or twice to Jesus, who was Man and God and who surely sassed His perfect mother at least once.

He jolts awake and half falls out the chair.

The social worker—something, Daisy, Violet, Rose, Rose—she says, “I’m sorry, Father. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“‘s fine,” Marcus says, rubbing his eyes. “How’s Harper?”

“Still sleeping.” Rose looks at the chair next to him, Marcus gestures to it. Shitty hospital waiting room chair, who is he to deny that to anyone. “How is your partner?”

“Getting patched up,” Marcus says. “They’re making sure nothing too important got cracked.”

Tomas might have died in that kitchen, hammer to the head, at the hands of the most mundane of evil, just a person with a hammer, just a person in a home with hatred in her heart, and Marcus had been upstairs with Harper and hadn’t a hunting rifle on hand, and Tomas might have died. Tomas did not die. Marcus thanks God for that, thanks Jesus for that, thanks mothers holy and otherwise for what interception they might have made. Had Mother Bernadette ever figured out that when Marcus prayed to the Virgin, it was his mother’s face he saw? He should have told her. Maybe she could have illuminated the difference between love and idolatry.

“He’ll be fine,” Marcus says to Rose.

“I’m glad,” Rose says. “You two saved Harper’s life.”

“You called the cops. You’d have saved her with or without us.”

Rose doesn’t deny this, accepts it with a beneficent tilt of her head. “It will be easier keeping her safe with the evidence you’ve given us. Nothing’s guaranteed but…”

“Nothing ever is.” Marcus leans his head back against the wall, wishes he hadn’t lost his hat somewhere in Nebraska, wishes he had it now to draw down over his eyes against the fluorescent buzz looming over them and Rose’s clever gaze. She’s too used to sadness. Picks it out of crowds like a sniper. It’s fine, it’s good, he’s glad she does, but she looks at him from time to time like a case she’s running a few decades behind on.

“Except God, right?” she says, a tired smile. He bets most things she does are tired.

“If he guaranteed anything, it wouldn’t be faith,” Marcus says. “But yeah. Except for Him.”

Marcus saw the face of God at twelve, and in a moment of revelation transformed from a boy holding together the scraps of his soul to an instrument of God. Where there is vision, there is no faith. Faith is a flower than grows in the fertile tilled shit of doubt. Marcus had no doubt.

Tomas has visions, and time will tell where they come from. Marcus has memories, worn thin as his mother’s linen shift. Together, they hunt demons. A mother tries to murder her child through poison and calls it salvation. Tomas meets Maxwell’s silver hammer, and Marcus wonders if Harper would like pencils. A charity gave Marcus pencils when he was about her age. They held him together long enough for the Church to salvage anything from them. Salvation is a perfect sketch of a blue jay; prayer is the thousands of drawings it took to get there. Marcus was in Virginia once—nowhere near Georgetown, seemed too touristy to gawp at some stairs—and he saw a cardinal, the bird kind, come to rest on a stone cross in a cemetery Americans would call old. Beautiful bird, red as berries and a perfect autumn. Marcus tried to draw it, but all he had was black and white. He ripped out that page of Deuteronomy when he was done. Didn’t seem worth it, that colorless sketch of a singing flame.

 _And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father._ God sets the cardinal to fall, and Marcus was sold to the church for a farthing. The scripture checks out.

It was a good bird. He fed it the crusts of his sandwich. Did more good for his soul that the human cardinals ever did.  

Rose sits quietly beside him and wears a look Jesus might have worn once or twice in his time: she knows how many souls there are to save. Had Mary offered Him comfort, when He was flesh and blood in one whole package before He broke Himself into modest bites? Had she told Him to wash up for dinner, just the two of them, tell all His friends they’d have to find somewhere else to loiter tonight? Stoked His head, anointed His feet, told Him a bedtime story about a brave little girl and a witch and a well and a forest full of knights and dragons? Had the Holy Mother set her son’s head down to rest upon her lap? Or had she told Jesus this was something He should really talk about with His father?

Harper’s father is gone, and so is Marcus’s, and Tomas misses his nephew even if he doesn’t talk about it, just like he doesn’t talk about Jessica either. Marcus isn’t a father anymore, and Tomas can never be one. But faith, padre, _dudas y fe._ God only gives what we can’t handle. He’s either given Marcus a fatal calling or nothing at all. Or, perhaps, something in between. He is God’s most beloved weapon or God has abandoned him altogether, he thinks, and Mother Bernadette’s pocket watch ticks in response something about narcissism and pride.

 “Bet she’d like crayons,” Marcus says, and nods at the closed hospital room door.

And Rose says, “I think she’d love that. Especially from her new hero.”

It’s a hell of a benediction. Marcus swallows it with a dry mouth. “Yeah, well,” he accepts. “I’m very cool, aren’t I?”

They laugh. Then stop. Marcus rubs his hands over his face, shoves the past as best he can back into the unsanctified ground, pats the grave dirt back over it, says a prayer, says another, gets up, and announces he’s going to go check on to Tomas, his partner, his trial, his gift, Tomas who is alive, as Harper is alive, as Marcus is alive. The souls of the innocent cry out for salvation; Rose closes her eyes to get what rest she can. Marcus leaves her to her respite and sets out to see where a man might buy a bloody big pack of crayons around here.

**Author's Note:**

> I scream truly shallow thoughts about the exorcist and my various adopted children who populate it over at [my tumblr](http://andhumanslovedstories.tumblr.com/)


End file.
